Smart trick to free up a lot of storage space on your iPhone
If you have an iPhone, you’ve no doubt been asked to buy an expensive iCloud storage plan that costs 99p for an extra 50GN per month – a whole 20p more than before.
But while Apple is free to raise prices whenever it pleases, the iPhone can recoup some of the cost each year with a nifty settings hack.
What many people don’t know is that the default text message lifespan is permanent — every message your iPhone sends and receives gets etched into your phone’s memory for its entire life.
A woman holding an iPhone (stock image)
This can come in handy when sifting through nostalgic memories or conversations with loved ones, but keeping every interaction on your phone takes up precious storage space — especially if it could save you a few pounds.
How to Optimize Your iPhone’s Storage for Free
To make sure you delete old text messages properly, you need to go to the Apple Settings app, scroll down to the Messages subsection and select it.
You will then be presented with a number of different options, but scroll down until you see ‘Keep messages’.
Once inside, hit the icon and scroll down until you get to the bottom of the page where you can see ‘message history’.
Select this and you will see 3 different prompts: 30 days, 1 year and forever.
You will see that your phone automatically puts all your messages in the “forever” category.
You will soon see that all your texts have been automatically placed in the eternal category
But if you select 30 days, you can permanently delete all text messages and message attachments that are 30 days old from your device
Once you’ve made the switch to keep text messages for 30 days, check your storage — and you should now have more space
But if you select 30 days, you can permanently delete all text messages and message attachments that are 30 days old from your device.
Proceed with caution if you have reminders you want to keep, but this single tap can save you on iCloud storage costs in the long run.
This is especially useful for users who have owned multiple iPhones over the years, or have recently switched from one model to another and transferred content from their old phone to their new device.
Once you’ve made the switch to keeping text messages for 30 days, check your storage — and you should now have more space.
If you go back to Apple’s settings and scroll down to “general,” you’ll be able to view your iPhone storage, where you’ll be presented with other alternatives to reduce waste — such as “offload unused apps” and “review downloaded videos.”
You will see a detailed overview of your storage usage.